I'm a student pursuing a doctoral degree in late medieval history. My main interests include but are not limited to Latin, Italian, cultural theory, educational curriculum, historiography, cognitive processes, language-theory, gender relations and THE WESTERN CANON (mwahaha); i am not particularly interesting, avant-garde or risque; My main hobbies include the exciting activities of cooking, baking, going to the gym, eating green apple-caramel lollipops, restaurant reviewing and acting as child-like and sassy as possible. I keep these entries from the years of my life - no matter how i feel about them today - available because i find it useful to revisit events i now interpret differently. My name is heather, i'm of Montreal and i was born in the nefarious, ominous year 1984.

The Pazzi/April Conspiracy

The wikipedia article on this topic was just awful - incidentally - and i’m making an effort to rewrite it for the betterment of human knowledge.
Lauro Martines, April Blood: Florence and the plot against the Medici (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003).
Martines’ April Blood uses the Pazzi conspiracy as a nexus from which to analyse the volatile [...]

The Great Florentine Fire of 1304

In 1304, after a failed arbitration attempt between competing aristocratic factions by the Cardinal of Prato, Florence was ravaged by a fire. Contemporary witnesses later estimated between 1700 and 1900 buildings burned. The gruesome details are recounted in two contemporary chronicles, Giovanni Villani’s Nuova Cronica and Dino Compagni’s Cronica, and two subsequent histories, Leonardo Bruni’s [...]